Updates on life in Japan

Days 360 & 361 Japan and….. Simi Valley?

News updates from yesterday (got home late and didn’t get to post this) and today… For folks in So. Calif, are they reporting the Rocketdyne news in MSM? (see the last entry below)

Fault under Tsuruga nuclear plant could trigger M7.4 quake: research

TOKYO (Kyodo) — An active fault running under the Nos. 1 and 2 reactors at Japan Atomic Power Co.’s Tsuruga nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture is at least 35 kilometers long and could trigger an earthquake with a magnitude of around 7.4, much higher than previously anticipated, a team of government-affiliated researchers said Monday.

“The worst-case scenario should be taken into consideration” as other faults on the south side of the Urasoko fault could become activated together, warned Yuichi Sugiyama, leader of the research team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

The first two presentations at the May 13th Commission meeting will cover reviews being conducted by the federal government in response to the natural disaster and resulting nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. The purpose of those presentations is to hear from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy about what steps are being taken to review the safety of domestic nuclear reactor and spent fuel storage facilities in light of the events in Japan. This memorandum provides an overview of the accident and the announced plans for recovery and remediation.

Overview

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake occurred, with an epicenter approximately 45 miles off the coast of the Tōhoku region of Japan. The earthquake’s magnitude has been estimated at 9.0 on the Richter scale. The epicenter was approximately 109 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor site.

The earthquake was the fourth-largest recorded in the world since 1900, and the largest in modern Japanese history. The earthquake (which has been officially named the Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster) triggered an immense tsunami that devastated large areas of the eastern Japanese coast. Over twenty thousand people are known dead, and thousands more are missing. Damage estimates are unknown at this time but could amount to several hundred billion dollars.

According to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the earthquake and subsequent tsunami affected fourteen nuclear reactors at four sites along the eastern coast – the Fukushima Daiichi site (six reactors), Fukushima Daini site (four reactors), the Ongawa [sic] site (three reactors) and the Tokai site (one reactor).

The most serious damage occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. When the earthquake struck, the three reactors at the site that were operating at the time—Units 1, 2 and 3—automatically shut down. Unit 4 had been shut down about three months before the event and its core unloaded into its spent fuel pool, and Units 5 and 6 had also been shut down well before the event.

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Real-time online tsunami feed starts

Weathernews Inc. has started a new service that provides tsunami information online using radars that can detect the waves within 30 km of the coast and capture images of them as fast as 15 minutes before they reach shore.

The radars are located at nine sites along the coastlines of Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures, which were devastated by last March’s monster waves, Weathernews spokesman Hitoki Ito said Tuesday.

The radars are able to detect tsumani that are at least 3 meters high and update their progress across the Pacific Ocean every two seconds, right up until the moment they smash into coastal areas, Ito said. “The defining difference between our service and the Meteorological Agency’s is that ours does not provide a forecast, but live tsunami coverage,” Ito said. “We think our system supplements the agency’s.”

However, Weathernews is only legally permitted to issue live images of tsunami with information on their location via its service, which began March 1. Under the law, only the Meteorological Agency can broadcast the estimated time tsunami will hit the coast and their forecast size.

Evacuees from March 11 disasters losing hope of going home

Villagers clean the kitchen of their home during a brief visit – their first since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami – to their house located near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, in Kawauchi, Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan, Tuesday, May 10, 2011. (Pool Photo)

Of those who have evacuated from areas hit hard by the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis, an increasing number are considering settling down in locations away from their hometowns, a Mainichi survey has found.

The latest survey, conducted nearly a full year after the onset of the triple disasters, is the second such survey by the Mainichi. In the first survey, conducted in August and September of last year, about six months after the disasters, 54 percent of respondents had said that they were thinking of settling permanently away from their hometowns. This time, 63 percent of respondents said the same, indicating an approximate 10-point increase from the earlier survey.

Fukushima farmers in two-front war

Holdouts plow ahead against radiation, and its negative image

NIHONMATSU, Fukushima Pref. — Radioactive realities and radioaction rumors continue to plague farmers in Fukushima Prefecture a year into the crisis that started last March 11 when a megaquake and monster tsunami put a local nuclear plant on a path to three reactor meltdowns.

Koichi Suzuki shows vegetables grown on his family-run farm at his shop in the city of Koriyama on Feb. 21. MIZUHO AOKI

Many farmers had to give up growing and just get away, particularly those in the immediate fallout zone of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 power plant. They left their fields to whither and their livestock to fend for themselves.

But there are others trying every means possible to remain in farming and overcome the crisis.

“Even after vegetables were declared safe and the ban on their shipments was lifted, that didn’t erase the image etched on the minds of consumers that the produce is tainted. It’s really hard to eliminate that. A lot of effort is needed to (reverse that image),” said Miyuki Sugeno, 51, a grower of organic rice and vegetables in the city of Nihonmatsu.

Growers were seeing cancellations of purchase orders for the rice crops they were set to grow after March 11, even though subsequent checks in many areas turned up no or very little radioactive cesium. Buyers were rushing to judgment.

“Rice was supposed to be shipped to the Kansai region. But (consumers) thought all produce grown in Fukushima was unsafe. I don’t know how to describe how I felt,” Sugeno said.

Fukushima was the nation’s fourth-largest rice-growing region in 2010, with a 445,700-ton harvest, according to the prefectural government.

Now a dark cloud hangs over the prefecture’s rice growers because of the nuclear disaster.

I wonder why they are still saying it was the tsunami when anyone who has been following this disaster knows that there was sufficient structural damage to pipes and to containment to lead to the crisis at Daiichi. No, I don’t really “wonder. The nuclear industry worldwide has a lot at stake here. Saying it can’t happen in other places if plants merely shore up against tsunamis and quakes is misleading.

Fukushima nuclear crisis was preventable: U.S. experts

WASHINGTON (Kyodo) — The nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan could have been prevented if Japanese authorities and the operator of the plant had strengthened safety measures in accordance with international standards, U.S. experts said Tuesday.

“With appropriate foresight by Japan’s authority and industry, it appears that the accident could have been avoided or prevented,” James Acton and Mark Hibbs, experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report.

“Had the plant owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., and Japan’s regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, followed international best practices and standards, it is conceivable that they would have predicted the possibility of the plant being struck by a massive tsunami,” they said.

However, the report argued that Japanese authorities and the utility firm known as TEPCO apparently underestimated the risk from massive tsunamis to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Fukushima Unit 3 Reactor-Well Cap Fractured?

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Panel revises upward intensity of anticipated Tokyo Bay quake

TOKYO (Kyodo) — A government project team said Wednesday a magnitude 7 earthquake with its epicenter in northern Tokyo Bay would register the maximum 7 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale on the eastern coast of Tokyo, higher than an earlier estimated level of upper 6.

The higher estimate comes as the depth of the epicenter is now estimated to be some 10 kilometers less than an earlier estimate of 30 kilometers, said the team of scientists organized by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry.

In its five-year study using data from some 300 seismometers in the Tokyo metropolitan region to analyze the underground structure, the team concluded that the epicenter, at a point where the Philippine Sea plate descends beneath the continental plate, would be shallower than earlier estimated.

Well they lied. They used the absorption towers for one month and stopped using them, but never bothered to tell they stopped using them.

In one month, they used 5500 kilograms of zeolite, which absorbed 5000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. In other words, 27.5 million becquerels of radioactive cesium was effectively caught. So the city thought “Oh that’s good”, and stopped using zeolite.

No Nuclear Nirvana

When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently approvedtwo new nuclear reactors near Augusta, Ga., the first such decision in 32 years, there was plenty of hoopla.

It marked a “clarion call to the world,”declared Marvin S. Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. “Nuclear energy is a critical part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy,” declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who traveled in February to the Vogtle site where Westinghouse plans to build two new reactors.

But it’s too soon for nuclear boosters to pop their champagne corks. Japan’s Fukushima disaster continues to unfold nearly a year after the deadly earthquake and tsunami unleashed what’s shaping up to be the worst nuclear disaster ever. Meanwhile, a raft of worldwide reactor closures, cancellations, and postponements is still playing out. The global investment bank UBSestimates that some 30 reactors in several countries are at risk of closure, including at least two in highly pro-nuclear France.

[snip]

Meanwhile, Japan — which has the world’s third-largest nuclear reactor fleet — has cancelled all new nuclear reactor projects. All but two of its 54 plants are shut down. Plus the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union.

This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi’s structurally damaged spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, which sits 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than was released at Chernobyl.

A total of 56.1 percent of the people in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures who died in the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami last year were aged 65 or over, National Police Agency (NPA) figures have shown.

Drowning was by far the highest cause of death, accounting for 90.6 percent of the fatalities — an indicator of the devastating power of the tsunami.

Police analyzed the state of damage in the three, hardest-hit prefectures as of Feb. 29 — nearly one year after the March 11, 2011 disaster.

Of the 15,308 victims in the prefectures who have been identified so far, 24.5 percent were in their 70s, while 22.1 percent were aged 80 or above. The figures show the heavy toll the disaster took on the elderly.

Most victims — 89.1 percent — were identified through their physical features or possessions. Other methods included dental records (7.5 percent), finger or palm prints (2.4 percent), DNA extracted from belongings (0.7 percent), and blood samples provided by the Japanese Red Cross Society (0.2 percent).

Besides drowning, other causes of death for the 15,786 bodies that were found included burning (0.9 percent) and being crushed or suffering heavy injuries (4.2 percent). The cause of death in 4.2 percent of cases remained unknown.

A total of 3,263 people remain missing. Of these, 27.3 percent are in their 70s and 21.6 percent are aged 80 or above — again highlighting the high toll on the aged.

(Mainichi Japan) March 7, 2012

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Controversy after US gov’t estimate showed 40,000 microsievert thyroid dose for California infants from Fukushima — Data not released to public — “Very high doses to children”

BRIAN: Did we ever get the — I’m trying to think of what the best term is, the — everything everything (inaudible) scenario back from — I thought that was one we were going to ask NARAC to run once they had time.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Are you talking about the doses they saw all the way out in California?

[snip]

We are looking to engage further with Sandia to make some modifications to the (inaudible) to effectuate those dose estimates in California. In conjunction with that, there was a DITTRA and NARAC dose estimate that was done for California that we obtained as part of the DOE briefing package. And those were estimating what we believe to be very high doses to children, and a thyroid (inaudible) dosage. We think that (inaudible) extremely conservative modeling related to those doses and assumptions. It’s a thyroid dose that involves deposition of material and (inaudible) integrated the dose over a year or two, for example, drinking milk from the same cow that’s grazing on the same contaminated field the entire time, things like that. But once we get the (inaudible), we will have something to compare (inaudible). Also, when we saw those dose estimates, we looked in the historical record for any kind of information related to Chernobyl actual deposits that were measured. We did find some and (inaudible) dose activity per area of deposits that were estimated — I think they were provided from DITTRA. We did the same dose calculations with those concentrations, and the doses were approximately 1,000 times lower.So we were in the one to 10 millirem range versus full rem range, which was — full rem thyroid dose range, which was being (inaudible) by DOE and DOE (inaudible). […]

Los Angeles-area Meltdown: Cesium-137 still up to 1,000 times higher than standard — Plutonium also detected — Located between Chatsworth and Simi Valley

A partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor occurred at the former Rocketdyne site in the hills between Chatsworth and Simi Valley in 1959

Radioactive chemicals […] as much as 1,000 times higher than standards

According to federal data released on Monday

Of the 437 samples collected, 75 exceeded standards

Seven radioactive isotopes, including one known as cesium-137, measured at levels between 100 to 1,000 times higher than the standards. Other radionuclides that suggest nuclear presence include strontium-90, tritium, plutonium, and carbon-14.

Community Response

The recent data is significant to residents, activists and public officials who have fought for years for the removal of radiation and chemical contaminants […]

The numbers provides hard evidence that not only do the radioactive materials exist, but that the levels are higher than expected.

[…] They wonder what else can be brewing within the rocks, the earth, and the groundwater within the 2,849-acre property.

Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica

“This confirms what we were worried about”

“This begins to answer critical questions about what’s still up there, where, how much, and how bad”

The findings are “extremely disappointing, especially because the site has already undergone two cleanup efforts by its owner, The Boeing Co., and the Department of Energy. Each declared the land fully cleaned”

Dan Hirsch, president of the activist group Committee to Bridge the Gap

“People have been waiting for this information for years”

“All those years, we were told it was clean”

“This data prove we’re not just a bunch of unknowledgeable people, but that everyday people are proven right”

“The Santa Susana Field Laboratory is a complex of industrial research and development facilities located on a 2,668-acre portion of the Southern California Simi Hills in Simi Valley, California […] The site is located approximately 7 miles (11 km) northwest from the community of Canoga Park and approximately 30 miles (48 km) northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Sage Ranch Park is adjacent on part of the northern boundary and the community of Bell Canyon along the entire southern boundary.” -Wikipedia